A decade-long study of the oceans has shown they are soaking up less and less carbon dioxide.
The oceans' ability to absorb the greenhouse gas halved between the mid 90s and the first five years of this century, scientists said.
The team of researchers, based at the University of East Anglia, carried out the study using …

Mmm links

If nothing else...

... at least this will finally put paid to that ridiculous geo-engineering scheme put about the other week wherein water would be pumped up from the depths using "millions" of pipes in order to promote algae growth.

Incidentally could someone explain how Ozone depletion could change wind patterns? I really don't see the link.

i propose....

that we take some country thats pretty big and has large unused urban areas (or if not flatten half the us) then make the biggest forrest since man began his woodchooping campaign then we can all ignore the carbon footprint stuff

Flee

Shinobi87

That is my plan, I am researching an number of technologies and techniques that would make this possible across Australia (and allow us to corner the dwindling supply of the timber market).

I have been worried about what this article has been talking about, and an cascading failure of Antarctica ice shelves for some time, and looks like it might be true.

Apparently, carbon is stored in water that sinks to great depths and travels fro hundreds of years, eventually coming up again. There are probably an number of possible reasons for what the article is reporting, this may or may not be related. Guess what happened in previouse centuries, the industrial revolution. If it is this water returning then we can expect absorption to go down as more polluted water comes through over time, maxing in hundreds of years. This could be an combination with saturation from present absorption as well, or mainly related to present trends, as long as it is not some cascading effect it will be slow after it quickly gets an lot worse than we thought. So, time to powder and fertilise that scrap metal and throw it in the dead zone.

The other thing, is an article recently that worried about an 1 meter short term see level rise, and 5 meter (2070 or end of the century I think) with failures of Antarctica sheets. I wonder what they guy will be revising his sea level rise predictions to given this latest news? I have been wondering about all this blustery Antarctica weather we have been getting this year, after the sea ice collapse in Antarctica. That cold air where warmer air should be means all that heat must be going somewhere. An 5 meter see rise is nothing compared to the possible sea rise.

The good news is that according to Al Gores "inconvenient" graphs ;) carbon levels should go up and crash as they have before (we hope) eventually. By those graphs, I think there is an feedback mechanisms, and an interesting thing I have seen speculated, is algae full sees (with jelly fish). There you go, not need to worry about seafood stock depletion, or need to burn more coal.

Diamond = Carbon

Pollution

I would think the decrease is due to the drop off in algae and the rest of the microorganisms in the oceans is due to pollution. Coral reefs are bleached and mercury levels are higher now in the oceans than ever before. Thermal venting below the earths mantle does help "scrub" the water but my guess is that system can only handle so much at a time. If we can keep from polluting our oceans then maybe some of these "greenhouse gas" effects will reverse.

@ Graham

Re: Ozone depletion and wind patterns.

Actually it's not so unlikely as you might think. Since ozone absorbs solar energy in the UV part of the spectrum, any decline in ozone concentration means that more UV travels deep into the atmosphere where it acts to heat the lower stratosphere and upper troposphere - precisely the places where major wind patterns develop.

Shinobi87 - No chance of a forest when there's demand for biofuels..

Enough!

"accelerating global warming"

Well it might if it was a major contributor to it, but the last time I checked, CO2 was responsible for about 5% of the greenhouse effect, and a doubling of CO2 levels has less impact than a few percent change in relative humidity, something we have virtually no control over at all!

@h2nick (and then some general ranting)

You forgot the third option: Chop down forests for more oilseed rape for fuel.

I am no environmentalist, and I shall explain why. In my unhuble opinion the current environmental movement has very little care for environments. No environs, just mental, that's how it seems to this poor sod. Still, even I can get worked up about environmental issues from time to time, and right now there are thousands of acres of forest being chopped down to grow crops for bio-fuels. The orangutan is facing the biggest threat for years because of short-sighted biofuel policies.

In fact deforestation is a huge problem in many parts of the world, and these policies are only going to make it even worse. I've seen the impact it can have first-hand while I was in Paraguay, and that was just clearance for food-crops. With the added pressure of biofuel production things just get a whole lot worse, and for no actual benefit.

That's the problem with this whole deal. The science, despite what people insist, is not settled. Anyone who reads the actual IPCC reports and not the policy-maker summaries (or worse, the media's analysis of the summaries) will see that our actual knowledge of atmospheric sciences is still in its infancy, and the so-called consensus has no basis in evidence, being merely an appeal to authority based on a-priori and increasingly fragile assumptions about how the atmosphere works. There is, I would point out, no consensus about Newton's laws of gravity or the fact that heating things makes them warmer. There doesn't need to be an appeal to the authority of consensus because the facts speak for themselves in those rather simplistic instances.

The facts do not speak for themselves in the AGW debate. The models that are used in place of hard data prove nothing except that you can make a program do whatever you like given specific assumptions. They are a logical fallacy, a dead-end, they do not reflect reality, are highly flawed and should not be used as a substitute for empirical evidence. Yet they are. That's just one problem out of any number of problems with the supposedly settled science, but it never makes it in to the summary for policy makers and the media simply ignore it.

So with that out of the way, my rant continues. The current status of global anthropogenic climate change trumps all other environmental concerns to the point where, as I mentioned, short-sighted policies that run counter to the very ethos of environmentalism are instigated in the name of "saving the planet". These policies are looked on with approval by the environmental lobby - which mostly consists of people like Al Gore - not because they actually achieve anything to save the planet (it's likely any gains made would be wiped out by a few months of heating Gore's pool) but because they are re-directing people's efforts toward the lobbyists' ways of thinking and doing. The fundamental problem is that the environmental movement has been hijacked by strutters and preeners who are more concerned with having people see them than they are with actually doing something constructive. If they believed their own hype then they'd tear down their palaces and mansions and live in energy-efficient homes, and do all their lobbying over the internet rather than flying everywhere in private jets.

They don't do this, ergo they are either callously exploiting the movement for their own self-promotion, or they are lying out of their arses. And in the meantime hundreds of species that could be saved right now, with very little effort, are being threatened with extinction because of policies inspired by these people.

Re: Flee

If we split the excess ocean CO2 we xould use the released oxygen to equalize the atmospheric O/CO2 ratio, then use the carbon to build a carbon nano-tube-based beanstalk to orbit, thus eliminating all of those polluting rockets...

No solution to a non-problem then

The Big [happy] Bang

At any time now we could experience a mega-type volcanic outburst on one of the major fault lines that will load the upper atmosphere with sun blocking debre and yippee we have a mini "ice age" which is really cool man!

The Matrix

Ok, maybe I'm just talking out my ass now, but with all the talk of harvesting the oceans for diamonds and nano-tubes... Why don't we just invent an AI that'll wage war on us, then we can "burn the sky" like they did in the matrix and have to live underground where it's warm? Can amanfrommars chime in on this? When is your army going to be ready?

A Question Please

Would anyone know how much carbon dioxide there has to be in the atmosphere to give people a sense of suffication, or at the least some lightheadedness? What part per million would cause this?

What is the amount at this time?

My understanding is carbon dioxide is heavy so wouldn't symptoms innitially show in populations in lower areas? On a planetwide scale at some point soon if not already. I mean, given the publication of recent findings on greenhouse gas level increases. I'm thinking that I should be more alarmed than I presently feel and perhaps I should some rebreather equipment.

I'd hate to think I'd just lie down and go to sleep concerning the issue.

maybe, just maybe...

warmer water holds less co2 than cooler water. then perhaps the oceans have warmed and are absorbing less co2, thereby increasing atmospheric levels of co2. perhaps the sun caused these oceans to warm starting say 10 or 15 years ago and some scientists have erroneously attributed the effect to the cause.